


Radically Opposed

by plutosrose



Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [14]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Brief Mention of Hydra Experiments, Captain Hydra (But Not Really), Historical Accuracy Attempted, Hydra's Nazi Ideology (Against), M/M, Non Period Typical Attitudes, Period Typical Attitudes, Pre-War, Wartime, not comic compliant, so much philosophy, steve is good
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-26
Updated: 2021-01-26
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:15:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,523
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29009643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plutosrose/pseuds/plutosrose
Summary: Raised by Hydra, Steve opposes radicalization at every turn.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: Stucky Bingo 2020 [14]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1830826
Comments: 12
Kudos: 34
Collections: Stucky Bingo 2020





	Radically Opposed

**Author's Note:**

> I have hopefully cited all of the quotes I referenced in-text, but if I have missed something, please let me know.
> 
> (Also please note, I have done my best to portray Sarah as a good mom, but there is a miscommunication that appears further in the story.)

When Sarah Rogers met Elisa Sinclair, she was seven months pregnant. She had no money, unless you counted Joseph’s papers from the U.S. government assuring him that he would see his army pay in the 1940s. Early in her pregnancy, she’d been able to get by with her wages from the hospital, but that hadn’t lasted after her supervisors had discovered that she was pregnant. Then, she’d gotten by cleaning houses. But now, seven months into her pregnancy, she was in pain all the time. Not to mention that the baby kicked constantly.

She’d even considered moving into a maternity home, but that was the last thing she wanted to do. Even if Joseph was gone, she still wanted this baby. 

Fortunately, the McGreerys--who, like many families in the neighborhood, had lost both of their sons in the war--were letting her stay with them until the end of her pregnancy. 

After that, she would be out on her own.

All told, she’d had remarkably good fortune to encounter Elisa. She’d dazzled her with her smart bowler hat, fox stole, and polished black high heels. 

She’d paid for her food at a nearby diner and handed her a card with an address on it. “We have meetings every Tuesdays and Thursdays. You should come by sometime, I think you’ll like what we have to say.” 

-

Sarah Rogers was no fool, she knew that there was something amiss with the meetings that Elisa had sent her too--the speakers spent a lot of time preaching to a group of yes-people who nodded along to every word that they said. Order. Unity. The suffering of all mankind shall bring harmony and peace like the world has never known. 

While most of it wasn’t much of a stretch from what she heard at the little Catholic service she went to every Sunday, some of it disturbed her. The way that people’s eyes tended to shine when the speaker spoke about suffering. This wasn’t just the meek-will-inherit-the-earth, God-has-a-plan-for-us. No.

This was a group of people, she thought, who were eager to suffer, and eager to see others suffer with them. 

But the sad truth on the matter was that she didn’t exactly have anyone else. War was brewing in Ireland, and she hadn’t been able to get a letter to her parents in months. She had no idea if she’d be able to get another nursing job once the baby was born, and beyond that, she had no idea how she’d even find a place to live for her and the baby. 

Elisa had come up to her after the end of a Thursday meeting, and held her hand as she tried to fight back tears. She’d been crying a lot lately, and as much as she wanted to blame it on the baby, she really couldn’t.

“We will help you with everything. We will take care of you. This baby is going to be someone special.” 

-

_Five years later._

Steve didn’t like school very much. It was too dark, and Mr. Whitehall and Dr. Fennhoff and Ms. Sinclair were always yelling at him. 

But what he did like was all of the books in the library. 

There were a lot of men standing guard in the school, kind of like King Arthur’s knights, maybe. He wasn’t sure. He’d only read about every third word of that before bigger books had caught his attention. 

Steve wandered up to a man who was standing stock still outside the library and tugged on the man’s sleeve, hefting the book that he’d found in the library up so that the man could see it properly. “What does this say?” Steve asked.

“Interpreters,” the man said. 

Steve considered this for a moment and said, “I have always thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.” 

A flicker of recognition passed over the man’s features when he glanced at the title of the book. He hesitated. “You shouldn’t read that book. Locke is wrong.” 

Steve gave the man a skeptical look. “Why?” 

“Humanity can not achieve order unless they...” the man trailed off, looking increasingly nervous as the seconds ticked by. “Unless they...” 

“Why?” 

The man sighed. 

-

As Steve got older, his life developed a certain routine. He had medical check-ups every six months, getting shots that seemed to cure every ailment that he’d been born with, including some that cropped up in the interim between appointments. 

He barely saw his mother after he started school. She knew his school as St. Francis’s School for Boys (a very prestigious school located in the Hudson Valley according to the notes that Ms. Sinclair had sent his mother), but upon questioning a couple of the men who were stationed in the hallways there, he’d learned it was actually called The Keep.  
-

He hated The Keep. It was dark and gloomy, and as far as he could tell, it wasn’t a real school. While he attended many lessons on grammar, philosophy, German, Latin, and mathematics, he had never seen anyone his age there, and the one time that he’d attempted to bring it up to his mother, (he’d been just shy of his thirteenth birthday), she had assured him that he must have been mistaken. 

“There have to be other children there, Steven,” she’d said, on one of the rare occasions that he’d been able to see her. “It’s a private school. What kind of private school only has one student?”

“Something that isn’t a damn school!” he’d shouted back.

“Steven,” Sarah fixed him with a steely glare. Steve had been locked in a battle of wills with his instructors at The Keep since he was five years old and had learned how to read, but his mother could always make him shrink under the weight of her stare.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured, and he really was sorry, because deep down he knew that his mother, coming from Ireland in the shadow of the Great Famine and losing her husband during the war struggled and sacrificed for him every single second of every day. She wanted him to get a good education. Maybe even go to college. 

It was at that moment that he decided that he would find a way to leave The Keep behind himself.  
-

In 1934, right after Steve had turned sixteen, he was finally able to put his plan to escape The Keep in motion. It had almost worked too--he’d managed to scramble over the top of the fences that surrounded the facility (seriously, what kind of school had fences that practically towered over the windows?) 

He managed to get down to the other side before Mr. Whitehall, one of his instructors, appeared out of the darkness. 

“Steven, please come back inside.”

“No.”

Mr. Whitehall let out a long sigh. “You have everything that you could possibly want here, Steven, I don’t understand why you would want to leave. You’re meant for great things, you do know that, right?”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. He heard from Mr. Whitehall and Dr. Fennhoff and Ms. Sinclair approximately six times a day that he was meant for great things. If it meant anything at first, it certainly didn’t mean anything to him now. “You’re going to need a better reason than that.” 

“You don’t know anyone in this part of New York, and you don’t have any money to get back home,” Mr. Whitehall said dryly, which only served to make Steve burn hotter with anger. He might not have planned this part of his escape, but he was certain that he could have figured something out. 

“Don’t care,” Steve huffed. “I’m going home.”

It was at about that point that Mr. Whitehall hefted him over his shoulder--Steve had been putting on more and more muscle lately, but he was still pretty small, and the fact that he was small enough for Mr. Whitehall to just pick him up made him feel absolutely apoplectic. 

He thrashed around in his grasp, trying as hard as he could to make Mr. Whitehall drop him. It was only when they were back through the gate that Steve finally managed to sink his teeth in Mr. Whitehall’s arm.

That got him dropped on the hard stone floor of the building’s entrance, and sent to his room without supper that night. 

-

When Hindenburg died the following month and Hitler consolidated power in Germany by declaring himself Fuhrer, Dr. Fennhoff was positively beaming at breakfast time. “This means good things for Germany and for the world, Steven. You will soon take your rightful place. Humanity is now on the path to learning what they can gain when they are prepared to sacrifice their freedom.” 

Steve barely looked up from his eggs. “To renounce liberty is to renounce being a man, to surrender the rights of humanity and even its duties--you heard that one before, Doctor?” 

“Yes, Rousseau,” Dr. Fennhoff grumbled, and didn’t say anything to him for the rest of the day.

-

Later that week, Dr. Fennhoff had decided that it would be important for them to discuss ‘society’s true degenerates.’ He assigned him a book that Steve had never come across in the library before-- _Imre: A Memorandum_. 

_Imree: A Memorandum_ felt...eye-opening. Spending most of his time in complete solitude, with only his instructors at The Keep and the ‘security’ to keep him company, it wasn’t as though he’d ever had any friends, or ever had the opportunity to have a girlfriend, though he had more than a couple of embarrassing fantasies, late at night, when studying his books full of neoclassical paintings, and had ended up jerking off when he was supposed to be writing papers about how an artist’s work could be used to create a great and powerful civilization. 

Mayne had written the book in 1906, twelve years before Steve had been born, and yet here he was, presenting the case that it was not only possible for two men to fall in love, but for them to fall in love and actually be happy together. Steve had never considered this, but once he did, it made so much sense. Like most of the claims that his instructors had made, the claim that homosexuality was a symptom of societal disorder had never really been backed up with any real evidence. 

It had been taking him less and less time to finish the books he was assigned to read and the papers he was assigned to write, and by the time he was done reading the book, it wasn’t lights out for another half hour.

That extra time made it easy for Giovanni Battista Moroni’s _The Man in Pink_ to worm its way into his head, his cock jerking against his trousers as the image of the man’s pink lips and lithe thighs settled into his mind. 

He snaked his hand underneath the waistband and wrapped it around his cock, stroking firmly once, twice, three times, before he was firmly pressing himself back into the pillows on his bed.

Huh. That was weird.

-

Dr. Fennhoff looked more annoyed than usual that morning when Steve met him in his classroom. His mouth had twisted into a tight line, and tension was visible in his jaw. “Please sit, Steven.” 

Steve sat at the desk, trying to school his expression into something hard and blank. 

“I would like to hear your thoughts about Mayne’s book about the harmful influence of the homosexual in society,” Dr. Fennhoff said in a clipped tone. 

Almost instantly, Steve’s blood boiled. 

"Before we loathe the homosexual as anarchist against Nature, as renegade toward religion, as pariah in society, as monster in immorality, as criminal in law, let us feel sure that we have considered well whatever the complex mystery of Life presents as his defense. That’s on the title page of the book,” Steve said, jabbing his finger against the page. “Mayne isn’t saying that homosexuals are anarchists who will destroy the social order, he’s saying that we shouldn’t judge homosexuals because life--and people--are more complicated than being defined in black-and-white terms as immoral or dangerous.” 

Dr. Fennhoff let out a long sigh. “Steven, I don’t understand why you insist on being so difficult. We give you these assignments for a reason, so that you can learn from us, so that you can be the great leader that we know that you’re on your way to becoming.”

“Is that what great leaders do? Decide that one part of the population is immoral because of who they are?”

Dr. Fennhoff drew his mouth into a tight line, the same way that he did when Mr. Whitehall caught him trying to scale the walls of The Keep when he was sixteen years old. “I think we’re done with our discussion for today, don’t you?”

“No, I don’t think we are,” Steve countered, “I really want to hear your explanation for why you think Mayne was trying to argue that homosexuals are anarchists when he was literally arguing the exact opposite. Oswald and Imre are together at the end of the book! They’re happy! What was the point?”

Dr. Fennhoff slammed his copy of the book shut and stood up. “I said we’re done for today. So we’re done for today.”

Steve’s mouth twisted. “Of course, sir.” 

-

But the truth of the matter was that Steve wasn’t done, not by a long shot. The Keep’s library had long been one of the few places in the world where he felt truly at home, and now, its place as a keeper of knowledge felt even more important. 

The Keep had an extensive collection of works, one that he was certain that his instructors had hoped he would read, absorb, and learn to see were full of ugly, dangerous flaws. But that had never been true, and now, it somehow felt even less true.

He spent hours absorbed in Theodore Winthrop’s _Cecil Dreeme_ , whose protagonist viewed friendship between men as more important than romantic love with a woman and whose title character’s gender wasn’t fixed throughout the story (another idea that ran contrary to much of the teachings at The Keep, where men and women were meant to have rigid roles in upholding societal order. If gender was constructed, then well, he didn’t think Dr. Fennhoff or Mr. Whitehall or even Ms. Sinclair would like that very much). 

He found Emma Goldman’s writings on homosexual rights and Walt Whitman’s poems. He read Radclyfe Hall’s _The Well of Loneliness_ and spent hours thinking about shame, which his instructors had repeatedly told him was something that he _should_ have felt whenever he critiqued their lessons. 

-

“Those are radical, unnatural texts,” Ms. Sinclair had told him the one time that she’d gone to fetch him from the library for dinner. 

“Hmm,” Steve hummed to himself. “Don’t think so.” 

“They’re for your education, Steven, I want to be perfectly clear. I don’t want you to read them and get the wrong idea. Dr. Fennhoff mentioned you’ve been arguing with him again in your lessons.”

Steve snorted at the word ‘again’ and didn’t move from his spot, slumped against one of the bookshelves, with a book across his lap and more stacked around him. Ms. Sinclair stood nearby, tapping her foot for an entire minute and a half, before she let out an exasperated sigh and stormed off. 

Steve, though, kept reading. 

-

Every day that passed seemed to make his instructors increasingly enthusiastic about the prospect of war in Europe. As much as he tried to push back on them, it was getting more than a little bit irritating to be trapped at The Keep with a bunch of people who were convinced that one day--maybe not today or tomorrow, but one day--he would come around and see things their way.

As though that had any chance of happening. 

But for a time, it was certainly easier to keep his head down and try to wait out his time there. He would be eighteen soon, and then he could leave and do whatever he wanted. All this crap about him being a ‘leader that humanity was waiting for’ would be forgotten. 

If only.

-

He hadn’t known his mother was sick until Ms. Sinclair had told him that she’d died. 

After that, a numbness unlike any that he’d known in his entire life, had overtaken him. He was aware of the fact that he was alive and still expected to adhere to his day-to-day routine, but all of it had taken on a new meaning. Or no meaning. He wasn’t sure if he could tell the difference anymore. 

War broke out. He wondered if his mother had felt the same sense of apprehension, the same need to do _something_ when she’d been the one facing down war in her youth. 

Truth be told, he could have gone anywhere. He was certainly old enough to leave The Keep, to leave his instructors. And honestly, maybe he should have. Maybe it would have been better. 

But then, he would have never met Bucky. 

-

After Americans had started being sent abroad, he’d bounced around between facility to facility that were not too different from The Keep, large, imposing, and depressing buildings. Dr. Fennhoff had disappeared not long after Pearl Harbor--all Ms. Sinclair had said was, “He’s doing important work abroad,” and Mr. Whitehall had disappeared after him, attending breakfast one morning and gone the next. 

Ms. Sinclair had prayed with him every morning, and would touch his arm and tell him that his mother (who was an incredibly hardworking and kind woman) would be very proud of him too. As awful as The Keep had been his entire life, he couldn’t bear to push and prod at her remarks when she was saying kind things about his mother. 

Then one morning, Ms. Sinclair was gone too, and a car was waiting for him outside the front of the building. 

-

That was how he’d found himself in Germany, deep behind the Axis’s lines. Ms. Sinclair had given him instructions to meet with a man named Arnim Zola, who, if he had to be frank, he liked even less than his instructors.

His instructors might have been vague about his studies, but Zola had lost all pretense of trying to argue his way into him agreeing with him. 

Instead, half the time he was with Zola, he was muttering to himself in German, mixing combinations of horrible-smelling chemicals that just got more horrible-smelling when they were mixed, and occasionally barking at him and telling him not to touch anything. 

He’d met with Schmidt once, but Schmidt had taken one look at him and said, “So you’re the American, huh? Make sure that you stay out of Zola’s way.” 

And to be sure, they were both incredibly strange and bizarre men, but he didn’t decide to strike out on his own, (although, he supposed, there was nothing stopping him from wandering outside of the factory in broad daylight). 

But as it happened, that decision hadn’t been his to make, either.

-

He’d watched as men were marched into the factory, filling up cages that had previously been used for storage. He ducked behind a pillar and soldiers shouting over each other in German, saw them poking at the men’s backs with their rifles. 

He furrowed his brow as he noticed Zola come out from behind a corner, wiping his hands off on his lab coat, and saying something to the soldiers. Zola was far away, clear on the other side of the factory’s main hall, and to Steve’s surprise, he was able to make out most of what he was saying.

‘Those four, bring them to me.’ 

He watched as a group of four men were separated from the others, wrenched apart from their fellow men. One man screamed and was roughly jabbed in the back with the butt of a rifle. Another looked down, resigned. The other two straightened up and looked the soldiers’ in the eye--but even from where he was standing, he could almost feel their elevated heart rates, their sweat. 

Their fear.

-

He had allowed himself to wallow in grief for his mother for a very long time, and that had clouded his judgment, he thought. She wouldn’t want anyone to suffer, and Steve didn’t have to be a genius (though according to the battery of tests they’d made him take at The Keep over the years, he was). 

He kept to the shadows in the factory, ducking behind boxes. At The Keep, he had learned how important it was to be patient, and he had grown accustomed to sitting still for hours. Waiting for nightfall--and waiting for the screaming to stop from the direction of Zola’s lab--wasn’t hard. 

Occasionally, when a soldier saw him, he reached out and twisted their necks. He’d grown increasingly aware of his strength over the years, but it had never really dawned on him just _how_ strong men could bend in his grasp. 

When he reached the first few cells, he unlocked the doors. 

“Who the hell are you?” one man asked. Steve shook his head.

“Doesn’t matter.”

He tossed guns that he’d collected from fallen factory guards into the men’s arms. “About five hundred feet that way you should be able to get to the exit. It will be pretty heavily guarded, though.”

“Doesn’t matter,” another man said, grinning wickedly. “I like a challenge.” 

After he’d opened the fourth cell door, he realized that he hadn’t seen any of the men that had been separated out from the others, and bolted down a corridor.

The first two men he found were dead, strapped to cold tables and staring up at the ceiling, faces contorted in expressions of pain. 

The third was bleeding from his eyes and begging for death. 

Steve gave it to him.

The fourth, surprisingly enough, looked mostly unharmed. 

The man had been muttering his name under his breath, over and over again like a prayer. When Steve approached, he looked up at him, dazed and glassy-eyed. 

“Are you Captain America?”

Captain America, Steve knew, was a man by the name of Gilbert Hodge, who had been stateside for the past few months, doing colorful shows with a lot of singing and dancing. 

Hodge was a brute and had already gotten tarred and feathered in the press for cussing at some children who wanted pictures with him, not to mention the accusations of impropriety with several married ladies. Elisa had told him that the American government had tried to keep it out of the press, but in the end, it was impossible. Hodge wasn’t Roosevelt. No one felt good about making him look good.

Steve didn’t want to lie. At The Keep, he’d annoyed his instructors more often than not by quoting Immanuel Kant’s position about lying, which, as Kant said, was morally wrong--for any reason. But standing there, with the man staring up at him, he was suddenly gripped with the absolute need to pretend that he was anyone else.

“Yes,” Steve nodded. “I’m Captain America.” 

He undid the straps that held the man to the table, before he wrapped his arms around him and heaved him to his feet. “Are you alright? Can you walk? I can carry you if you can’t.”

The man smiled too wide, wrapping his arms around his neck. “You gonna carry me, soldier?” 

A flush went up Steve’s neck, and he remembered the first time that he’d read _Imre: A Memorandum_. “Well, if you want. Maybe. Some time. But right now, we have to get out of here. We don’t have much time.” 

The man babbled something incoherently under his breath, that even with Steve’s excellent hearing he had trouble understanding. “It’s okay, you’re going to be okay.”

He had no idea if that was at all true--he was almost certain that the self-destruct mechanisms in the factory had already been enabled. They likely didn’t have very much time. 

“Just hold onto me,” Steve murmured. “You can do that, right?”

The man nodded and practically burrowed his way into his side. “I’m B-ucky,” he murmured into his shoulder. “Bucky Bucky Bucky. Not James, Bucky. 32557038.” He muttered the number a few more times as Steve dragged him along, trying to remember the layout of the base that he’d seen in the maps back home. 

He’d led him through the long, windowless corridors before Bucky spoke again, “Men...my men...are they?”

“I let them out,” he nodded. “After that, it’s up to them.”

Bucky nodded and slouched against him. “Thanks, Captain America.”

Steve’s stomach turned uncomfortably. “Yeah, uh...just Steve, is fine.” 

“Just....Steve,” Bucky murmured into his neck. “I like Just Steve. Did you know that Just Steve saved my life?”

Steve chuckled nervously. “I haven’t saved your life yet, pal.” 

Just as they reached the final set of stairs, alarms went off. Steve’s stomach turned at the sound. “We have to hurry,” he said, pulling Bucky along with him with a little bit more force. “We’re running out of time.” 

Bucky didn’t seem to understand the urgency in his tone, because he was still gazing up at him, eyes roaming across his features. “Were you small, once?”

Steve blinked at him. “Once, a very long time ago. I haven’t been small for a while. How did you...how did you know that?”

“There was a small boy once,” Bucky murmured, clinging hard to him. “There was a small boy I remember getting into a fight with these bigger boys in the neighborhood. I can’t remember...I can’t remember...”

When Steve thought really hard, he could vaguely remember getting into a fight with some older boys right before he’d started spending almost every moment of his life at The Keep. “Was that you? The boy who tried to pull me away?”

Bucky nodded into his neck, humming to himself. Steve felt a wave of inexplicable affection for this stranger, one that wasn’t just motivated by his desire to do the right thing and save his life. 

Just then, Steve heard an explosion in the distance, and the catwalk that connected the stairs to one of the building’s exits was rocked when another explosion went off, this time a lot closer, kicking up dust and dirt and awful chemical smells that Steve wouldn’t forget for the rest of his life. 

Up ahead, he could see Schmidt and Zola. Schmidt turned slowly to face him, hands reaching up to peel back his human face. “Are you coming, Steven? We only have a matter of time before the Allied troops get here.”

Steve narrowed his eyes at him. “I am leaving, but not with either of you.” 

“We are your family, Steven. All of Hydra is,” Schmidt said, with outstretched arms. “We want the same things.”

“With all due respect sir, you have no idea what it is that I want,” Steve said. 

Schmidt looked at him for a moment, before he burst out laughing. “This is the Chosen One that Sinclair was babbling on about.” 

Steve looked over at Bucky, who was still clinging tightly to his jacket, and waited for him to ask why Schmidt was talking about him like he knew him. Bucky just looked up at him, glassy-eyed, wide smile and said, “Did you see that guy just ripped off his face?” 

“Yeah, it’s pretty weird, isn’t it,” Steve said absently, as Zola tugged on Schmidt’s sleeve. 

“Sorry, I can’t stick around,” Schmidt grinned, face stretching in what was probably meant to be a smile, but just looked obscene and painful. “I’ll be sure to send Sinclair my regards.” 

“Coward!” Steve shouted as Schmidt and Zola disappeared in a cloud of smoke that was kicked up by another explosion. 

Bucky was still looking at him with wide eyes, muttering something under his breath about ‘the man with a red face.’ Steve took a deep breath and tried to extract Bucky from himself as best he could. “You need to get across.”

Somehow, Bucky understood, nodding as he braced himself and stepped lightly across the metal walkway. 

Steve was able to breathe a little easier when Bucky made it across, especially since the catwalk gave way a few seconds later, metal snapping and melting as more boxes and cargo caught fire below. “Just go!” He waved a hand toward the exit. “Get out of here!”

And Bucky, who likely still believed him to be Captain America, glared hard at him. “No! Not without you!” 

In the sincerity in Bucky’s tone made Steve feel more than a little guilty, but he couldn’t think about that, not when the factory was literally coming down around them, and Bucky, stupid, beautiful Bucky, seemed determined to wait for him to jump across the divide before he went any further. 

It suddenly occurred to Steve that Bucky wasn’t going to move if he didn’t leave too. He bit his lip. 

“I’m not Captain America!” Steve shouted over the divide, as another explosion went off. 

“You think I give a shit?!” Bucky shouted back, remarkably clear-eyed and sober for someone who, up until a few minutes ago, had been clinging so hard to him that Steve had been having a difficult time staying upright for the both of them. 

Steve let out an exasperated sigh, and turned around, before he ran and jumped with more power than he ever had before in his life. 

He practically crashed into Bucky on the other side, the metal swaying uncomfortably beneath their feet. “Let’s get out of here.” 

Bucky nodded and followed him to the exit.

-

Watching the factory explode in the distance made him feel relieved, and the sound of gunfire made him hope that the men had been able to get out alive.

But when Bucky turned to look at him, raising an eyebrow, he felt much less relieved. 

“You’re not a soldier, are you?”

Steve’s resolve to lie crumpled the more that he looked at Bucky, who looked like some of the artwork in The Keep that his instructors had tried to convince him was ‘degenerate.’ 

“No,” Steve admitted.

“Who are you, really?”

Steve shrugged. “No one.”

Bucky huffed out a laugh. “Is your name actually Steve?”

“It is.” 

“It’s thirty miles back--we’re going to be walking all night,” Bucky tutted to himself. 

“I was...someone,” Steve said carefully. “But I’m not that person anymore. But I don’t think I was ever that person. I don’t know. It’s complicated.”

“Sure does sound complicated,” Bucky snorted. “That damn near made no sense. I just want to know if I can trust you.”

“Saved your life, didn’t I?” Steve grinned.

“Yeah, I guess you did,” Bucky smiled back, which made warmth bloom underneath Steve’s skin. 

“But maybe you should...turn me over to your superiors,” Steve added, face falling. “Those men…”

Bucky raised an eyebrow and shook his head. “You’d have to be the worst Nazi ever to let a bunch of prisoners go.”

Steve laughed nervously and focused his gaze on the horizon, so he wouldn’t have to look directly at Bucky. “I can give your unit maps of every Hydra base in Germany. I’ve seen them all. I remember them all from memory.”

Bucky stopped walking for a moment and furrowed his brow. “Okay,” he said after a tense moment. “Then that’s what you’ll do. But they’re not taking you in for saving hundreds of soldiers. I’m not letting that happen.” 

It was more than he deserved, Steve thought, but he was selfish, most likely, and he loved the idea that Bucky was already willing to defend him to his superior officers, even if Bucky probably shouldn’t have.

-

“I would like to turn myself over to your unit,” Steve said to the Colonel, which made Bucky roll his eyes. 

“I told him all night that I wasn’t going to let him do that. He saved hundreds of men--”

The Colonel held up a hand. “You said that you can replicate Hydra bases from memory?” 

Steve nodded. “Yes, sir.”

A woman with bright red lipstick, and hair styled in tight victory rolls looked over at the Colonel, who nodded.

“I believe we have a proposition for you, Rogers.”

-

A couple weeks later, Steve was beginning to feel like he had a purpose, handing over map upon map to the Strategic Scientific Reserve and building a team to infiltrate them. Yes, this was what he was always meant to do.

It was late when he went back to his room at the hotel, and to his surprise, Bucky was standing there, leaning against the doorframe. 

“I just wanted to thank you properly,” Bucky “If that’s alright with you.” 

“Yeah,” Steve nodded, letting out a shaky breath and opened the door to his room. “It’s more than alright.” 

Yeah, a lot had changed in a very short amount of time, Steve thought. 

And, when the door was closed and locked, if Bucky had dropped to his knees and sucked his cock, that was no one’s business but his own.

**Author's Note:**

> Radically Opposed  
> Creator(s): plutosrose  
> Card number: 012  
> Link: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29009643  
> Square filled: D1, Family  
> Rating: M  
> Archive warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply  
> Major tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Hydra's Nazi Ideology (Against), Captain Hydra (But Not Really), Steve Is Good, Period Typical Attitudes, Non Period Typical Attitudes, Historical Accuracy Attempted, Not Comic Complaint, Brief Mention of Hydra Experiments
> 
> Summary: 
> 
> Raised by Hydra, Steve opposes radicalization at every turn.
> 
> Word count: 5,523


End file.
